Politics

Subterms

    More stories

    • 75 Shares119 Views

      in World Politics

      The Travails of America’s Higher Education

      by

      American universities are among the best in the world. Harvard, Stanford, MIT and Yale, to name but a few, attract the best and the brightest of their generation, year after year. The competition is brutal. Most applicants are rejected. American universities, however, are not only among the best in the world — they are also among the most expensive. A non-resident student at one of the top public universities, such as UCLA, Berkeley or the University of Virginia, pays more than $ 150,000 for a four-year undergraduate degree. A professional master’s degree, such as business or law, costs you well over $100,000 a year. No wonder that higher education has become a multibillion-dollar quasi-corporation, with university presidents behaving — and being remunerated — like CEOs.

      Until COVID-19, business was booming. The pandemic, however, has thrown a monkey wrench into the works, and university administrators are at a loss of how to respond to the crisis. The problem is that as higher education in the United States morphed into big business, it increasingly reached out beyond America’s borders, actively seeking to recruit international students. Last year, for instance, there were some 90,000 German students enrolled in American universities. Their numbers pale, however, in comparison to Chinese students, who in recent years amounted to over 350,000. Universities love foreign and non-resident students if only because more often than not they pay full tuition.

      Up in the Air

      The combination of COVID-19 and Trumpian nativism poses a serious threat to this arrangement. As the pandemic spread across the nation, universities were forced to close their doors and go online. And with the pandemic threatening to engulf the whole nation, largely thanks to the administration’s incompetence and utter lack of preparedness and empathy, the immediate future of higher education is completely up in the air. Foreign students are in the United States on a visa that requires them to pursue their degree at a (physical) university. As universities become virtual, switching to online teaching, this no longer applies, or so Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced in early July.

      This meant international would be required to leave the country or face deportation. Immigration suggested that international students whose university moved online consider transferring to another university that still offered in-person instruction – under the circumstances a rather ridiculous proposition. In any case, ICE announced that the Department of State would no longer “issue visas to students enrolled in schools and/or programs that are fully online for the fall semester” nor would immigration authorities “permit these students to enter the United States.”

      Student Visa Debacle: All One Needs to Know About Trump’s Presidency

      READ MORE

      In response, a number of major private and public universities filed a lawsuit against the federal government over the measure. In the days that followed the administration reversed course, admitting the “proposal” had been “poorly conceived and executed.” This, however, failed to smooth the waves of academic indignation. On July 14, the president of MIT, Dr. L. Rafael Reif, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times, in which he claimed that America needed foreign students. Foreign students, he charged, were essential for American competitiveness and innovation. “As a nation,” he maintained, “when we turn our backs on talented foreign students, we not only lose all that they bring to our classrooms and laboratories, we also give up a strategic asset.”

      To illustrate the point he chose as an example Chinese PhD students — not particularly felicitous given the current anti-Chinese sentiments prevalent in America today. Most recent data showed, he wrote, “that 83 percent of Ph.D. students from China, the kind of highly trained scientists and engineers who drive American innovation, were still in the United States five years after completing their degrees.”

      The Resentment of the Privileged

      The New York Times allows its readers to comment on op-ed pieces. It is difficult to know if Reif was prepared for some of the responses he got from his readers. Quite a number of commentators questioned the MIT president’s motives behind his defense of foreign students, and particularly Chinese students. Others insisted that American students should get preference. Others charged that foreign students were “squeezing out” qualified American applicants for the simple reason that American top universities put them in a position to do so. Undoubtedly, resentment transcends class boundaries.

      There are, however, good grounds for this resentment. One of the most burning socioeconomic issues today is inequality. COVID-19 has once again drastically shown that inequality is a multidimensional phenomenon, related to a range of markers — gender, race, class and particularly education. Take, for instance, “assortative mating,” which refers to the tendency of people to choose a partner with a similar background, such as education level. Studies show not only that assortative mating has steadily increased over the past decades, but also that it has a non-negligible impact on socioeconomic inequality.

      It has also been shown that parents’ education level has a significant impact on their child’s educational attainment. Children from families where the parents are highly-educated are more likely to succeed in high school, more likely to attend and graduate from university and more likely to get a well-paying job. In this way, inequality is passed on to the next generation.

      A second reason for the resentment expressed by some of the comments in The New York Times is probably more mundane, more “human, all too human.” Top American universities are the incubator of America’s elite, similar to Oxbridge in the UK and the grandes écoles in France. With top universities seeking to attract foreign students, there are fewer spaces from the “native-born.” Given the profile of the average reader of The New York Times, the resulting resentment is quite understandable. Nativism is usually associated with “ordinary people” having to compete with migrants for scarce resources such as social welfare.

      This does not mean, however, that the privileged are immune to nativism. And the resentment of the privileged is bound to increase in the years to come. Until now, highly educated professionals in the West were largely protected against international competition. Studies suggest that COVID-19 is going to boost trade in services. The acceleration of trade in services, in turn, is likely to affect a range of professional services — finance, consulting, accounting, legal services, even medicine — hitherto shielded from international competition. Under the circumstances, the resentment of the highly educated is perfectly understandable. Foreign students from China and India at Harvard and MIT are the likely competitors of their offspring a few years ahead. And they are likely to win the race.

      Luxury Good

      It appears American higher education is in a pickle, some of its own making, some not. The reality is that higher education has become a luxury good in the US. For most Americans today, college education represents the second-largest expense after buying a home. Over the past three decades or so, tuition costs have more than doubled, in some cases significantly more. One of the reasons has been deep cuts by states for higher education, particularly in the wake of the Great Recession: Since 2008, tuition and fees in four-year public schools increased on average by more than 30%.

      At the same time, however, universities are also to blame. One of the main reasons for the spiraling costs of higher education is the dramatic expansion of university bureaucracy. In the years following the Great Depression, and state funding cuts notwithstanding, administration costs skyrocketed. According to Forbes, between 1980-81 and 2014-15 school years, administrative costs at private and public schools increased from $13 billion to $122.3 billion. During the same period, instruction costs increased from $20.7 billion to $148 billion. In the process, the number of administrators has steadily risen largely outpacing the hiring of full-time faculty. In fact, in today’s universities, a significant part of the teaching is done by part-time faculty more often than not paid a pittance — around $3,000 per three-credit course.

      As has been the case in so many other areas, COVID-19 has brutally exposed the complete lack of awareness of what is happening in the “real” world and of preparedness for contingencies on the part of those supposed to be in charge in higher education, namely its highly remunerated administrators. In a recent scathing critique in The Chronicle of Higher Education, a Johns Hopkins University professor has released all the pent-up anger that has accumulated over the years: “Even as they continue enriching themselves,” he charges, “university executives have revealed themselves ineffective in one of the most basic corporate responsibilities: managing financial risk. In a few short weeks, astonishingly wealthy institutions across the country were reduced to slash-and-burn strategies to maintain their solvency. Having consolidated power in their hands over the last generation, leaders of America’s wealthiest universities lacked financial reserves — while also squandering the reserves of their communities’ trust and goodwill.”

      The professor’s ire is understandable, given the heavy losses Johns Hopkins has projected it will incur as a result of the pandemic and its impact on its faculty. The university expects losses for the next fiscal year to amount to more than $350 million, partially to be met by cutbacks. In addition to restrictions on new hiring, the possibility of furloughs and even layoffs, the president of the university announced that JHU would suspend the university’s contributions to individual retirement accounts — for all practical purposes amounting to a pay cut.

      COVID-19 marks a rude awakening for America’s premier universities, laying bare all the problems associated with the “corporatization” of the institution of the university and “the monetization of just about everything within the institution” that are at the root of their current predicament. Under the circumstances, the MIT president’s op-ed piece is understandable. It certainly won’t fix the system of higher education.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in World Politics

      Opposing Repressive Regimes in the Middle East Is a Death Sentence

      by

      The ruling by Bahrain’s top judicial body, the court of cassation, on July 13 to uphold the death sentences of Mohammed Ramadhan and Husain Moosa has been decried by human rights organizations, condemned in the UK House of Lords and questioned in the British Parliament. Whether any of that will save the men from execution is debatable.

      The men were convicted and sentenced to death in 2014 for the killing of a policeman. That conviction was overturned when evidence emerged that they had been tortured into giving false confessions. Despite that decision, the death penalty was reinstated and subsequently confirmed by the court of cassation. An official in the public prosecutor’s office defended the court’s latest ruling while denying the accusations of torture, claiming that medical reports showed that the confessions were obtained “in full consciousness and voluntarily, without any physical or verbal coercion.”

      In Bahrain, Justice Is Still a Far-Off Goal

      READ MORE

      That confounds the earlier court decision to throw out the convictions, which was based on an investigation undertaken by the Bahraini government’s own Special Investigation Unit that showed the men had been tortured. However, in the contorted reality of the kingdom’s politicized judicial system, the court of cassation decided that the convictions were not based on evidence extracted under torture but rather on other evidence.

      “Close and Important Relationship”

      Amnesty International denounced the latest verdict, saying: “The two men were taken to the Criminal Investigations Department where they were tortured during interrogation. Mohamed Ramadhan refused to sign a ‘confession’, though he was subjected to beating and electrocution. Hussain Ali Moosa said he was coerced to ‘confess’ and incriminate Mohamed Ramadhan after being suspended by the limbs and beaten for several days.”

      Moosa has said that, after his genitalia were repeatedly beaten, he was told that if he signed a confession implicating Ramadhan his sentence would be commuted to life: “They were kicking me on my reproductive organs, and would hit me repeatedly in the same place until I couldn’t speak from the pain. I decided to tell them what they wanted.” His repudiation of the confession was ignored by the courts.

      In UK Parliament, four days prior to the court of cassation ruling, the Conservative MP Sir Peter Bottomley had asked Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab for a statement on whether he would use what he called “the UK’s constructive dialogue” with Bahrain to publicly raise the cases of the men. In reply, the Minister for the Middle East and North Africa James Cleverly spoke of a “close and important relationship” with an “ongoing, open and genuine dialogue” with Bahrain. The minister averred that “this dynamic” enabled the UK to raise human rights concerns, adding “the cases of Mr Moosa and Mr Ramadhan had been, and would continue to be, raised in conversations with officials in Bahrain.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      Earlier this month, it was revealed that another heavily politicized judiciary, this time in Iran, had upheld the death sentences of three young Iranian protesters who had been arrested in November of last year during countrywide protests that saw hundreds killed by security forces. Though moving swiftly to convict the men and sentence them to death, the authorities have done virtually nothing about investigating the killings carried out by the state in suppressing the protests. Amongst media highlighting their case is the Saudi news site Al Arabiya. It noted that a hashtag trending in Iran, “#do not execute,” has had over 2 million tweets. On July 19, Iran halted the executions, according to one of the lawyers for the accused.

      In 2019, Saudi Arabia executed a record 184 people, including six women, many for drug-related offenses. Some were crucified after being beheaded. At least one was a minor. In April, the kingdom announced it would no longer execute juveniles; rather it would sentence them to a maximum of 10 years in a juvenile detention center. It is unclear if the decree will save the life of Ali al-Nimr, who was 17 when arrested and 19 when sentenced to death. His uncle Nimr al-Nimr, a prominent Shia Muslim cleric and critic of the ruling family, was beheaded in 2016.

      State-Sanctioned Arbitrary Killing

      In Egypt, more than 2,000 people have been sentenced to death since Abdel Fattah el-Sisi came to power in 2013, with nearly 200 executed. At least 10 children have been sentenced to hang. In the country’s prison system, there is another kind of death — by deliberate medical neglect, as was the case with the country’s first democratically elected president Mohammed Morsi. He was repeatedly denied medication for his diabetes and collapsed and died in a Cairo court on June 17, 2019.

      On November 8 last year, a panel of UN experts led by Agnes Callamard, the special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, concluded that Morsi’s death “after enduring those conditions could amount to a State-sanctioned arbitrary killing”. The case shed light on the horrific conditions in Egypt’s overcrowded and brutal prison system, a situation that has been severely exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

      On July 13, prominent Egyptian journalist Mohamed Monir died from COVID-19. He had been arrested and held in pre-trial detention for criticizing, on the Al Jazeera news network, the government’s handling of the coronavirus crisis. The charge against him was broadcasting false news. The 65-year-old suffered from heart disease and diabetes, and was therefore at high risk of contracting the disease. After falling ill Monir was released to hospital a week before he died. An influential critical voice was silenced. Surely that was the intention — death, be it by medical malfeasance or by execution, is a powerful weapon in the hands of authoritarian regimes.

      *[This article was originally published by Arab Digest.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

    • 88 Shares179 Views

      in World Politics

      Under Pressure, Will Trump Wag the Dog?

      by

      As commentators in the US media continue to track and assess the accelerating decline of President Donald Trump’s prospects for reelection, some are wondering whether he will be tempted to organize a spectacular “October surprise” to magically overcome his ever-increasing gap in the polls. His behavior in recent days has appeared increasingly desperate, as demonstrated in this week’s shambolic Fox News interview with Chris Wallace.

      Some have speculated that Trump may now be feeling the need to assert leadership in foreign policy after singularly failing to do so on the real crisis at hand: the national response to the coronavirus pandemic. Alexis Dudden, an expert on Korea and Japan, evokes two hypotheses that concern North Korea: “If it strikes Trump’s fancy in the middle of the night to fly to Pyongyang and meet Kim in an effort to appear presidential, he will. If it strikes Trump’s fancy in the middle of the night to order a militarized attack on a North Korean nuclear facility in an effort to appear presidential, he will.”

      Political Behavior and Basketball Correctness

      READ MORE

      The Intelligencer sees another scenario, one that is less speculative based on events that are already taking place. In an article with the title, “Could War With Iran Be an October Surprise?” the author, Jonah Shepp, reviews recent events concerning a series of mysterious explosions affecting Iran’s nuclear facilities. There is more than a strong suspicion that Israel is responsible for at least some of the unusual incidents. Shepp highlights the value escalation may have for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been under extreme pressure for more than a year through a series of inconclusive elections and is now desperate to find a way to escape the possible consequences of his trial for corruption.

      Mitch Prothero, writing for Business Insider, suggests a direct connection between Netanyahu’s dilemma and Trump’s quandary in an article with the title, “Israel keeps blowing up military targets in Iran, hoping to force a confrontation before Trump can be voted out in November.” Trump may also be hoping that if Israel takes the lead, he will be justified in following through, with the hope that the nation would fall in line behind a wartime president.

      Both Shepp and Prothero focus on the sense of urgency felt in Israel to profit from what may be the last few months of Trump’s presidency before he becomes a lame duck, as now seems nearly certain. Prothero explains that, for the moment, Israel’s decision has been “to follow the Trump administration’s lead of exerting ‘maximum pressure’ on the Iranians.” Prothero quotes an EU intelligence official: “The attacks appear to be part of a campaign of “maximum pressure, minimal strategy.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Maximum pressure:

      In 21st-century diplomacy, political sadism directed against civilian populations to persuade them to respect interests and values that may be foreign to their culture 

      Contextual note

      Shepp calls Israel’s attacks “short-of-war actions.” He predicts that an administration led by Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, “would probably not continue Trump’s ‘maximum pressure’ approach to Iran and would not be as solicitous of Israel’s covert operations.”

      The EU official quoted above believes that “the Israeli plan here is to provoke an Iranian response that can turn into a military escalation while Trump remains in office.” The Israelis would thus aim at drawing the US deeper into a struggle that includes a very real potential of turning into a war. Trump is likely to play along if he believes it will make him look like a wartime president in the weeks before the November election.

      The situation is risky for numerous reasons. None of the parties would welcome war itself, but the ratcheting up of tensions to the point at which the fear of hostilities becomes palpable might be seen as the last-minute trick that allows both Netanyahu and Trump to hold onto the reins of power that appear to be slipping from their respective hands.    

      Historical note

      Following the disastrous experience of George W. Bush’s never-ending wars in the Middle East in what might be called more than maximum pressure on nations that fail to follow the American game plan, the past two US administrations have tended to turn to economic sanctions as the principal means of “persuading” governments to obey their dictates. Donald Trump has turned the policy into a reflex in his foreign policy. He routinely directs sanctions not only against recalcitrant nations but even against individuals, such as the members of the International Criminal Court who have dared to threaten an investigation of American or Israeli war crimes.

      In an article on Al Jazeera, Eva Nanopoulos reminds readers that it was US President Woodrow Wilson who first launched the idea of economic sanctions. Once the trauma of World War I had passed, Wilson got to work looking for ways of imposing order while avoiding the messiness of war. His promotion of the League of Nations was a crucial element. The key to making the League of Nations work could only be economic sanctions, which Wilson described in this way: “Apply this economic, peaceful, silent, deadly [and] terrible remedy. It does not cost a life outside the nation boycotted but it brings a pressure upon the nation which, in my judgment, no modern nation could resist.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      President Wilson invented the logic of maximum pressure that has become the most used and abused tool in the foreign policy toolbox under the Trump administration. “There always was a degree of irony in Wilson’s juxtaposition of peace and death,” Nanopoulos writes. 

      Paradox might be a more appropriate word than irony to describe a policy that is both “peaceful” and “deadly.” There can be no greater moral failure and manifestation of hypocrisy than the deliberate inversion of a widely understood moral concept. Because people spontaneously think of war as a form of organized killing, they can be persuaded to think that so long as a state of war doesn’t exist, economic sanctions, which indirectly but just as surely cause death and suffering, may no longer be considered killing. After all, if there is no smoking gun, no crime has been committed.

      Nanopoulos describes the result: “All served the same cause: to advance imperial ambitions without assuming the risks and responsibilities of war. With the establishment of the League of Nations, multilateral sanctions became part of an international arsenal used to effectively preserve the colonial status quo.”

      It has become customary to invoke the famous “rule of law” that we use to characterize the world order after 1945. The aftermath of World War II saw the creation of the United Nations and a global financial system given a stable structure at Bretton Woods. It didn’t eliminate war, but it kept wars local while developing global trade. Nations and the UN began deploying the threat and the application of economic sanctions. Still, we should not lose from sight the links to European colonialism and emerging American imperialism that Wilson built into the notion of sanctions when he described them as being both peaceful and deadly.

      Maximizing sanctions avoids war. But going to war can still have its merits, mainly in terms of electoral advantage for insecure and contested leaders. Margaret Thatcher demonstrated the principle in the Falkland Islands in 1982. This is traditionally called the tail wagging the dog. Whether it is done through war or simply through Wilson’s and Trump’s maximum deadly pressure, Shakespeare’s Macbeth probably had it right when — allowing for an appropriate adjustment in the spelling — he called it “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Click here to read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in World Politics

      China Is Flexing Its Muscles in the South China Sea

      by

      As the coronavirus continues to spread across the globe, China is taking advantage of the chaos and the preoccupation of governments with battling the pandemic. Beijing has long been opportunistic, so it is using what it sees as a unique confluence of circumstances to strengthen its strategic, geopolitical and military position. This is being done in a number of ways — using soft and hard power — by delivering personal protective equipment (PPE) throughout the world, increasing its foreign aid, rejiggering the Belt and Road Initiative and reinforcing its militarization of the South China Sea.

      Beijing Wants to Rewrite the Global Rulebook

      READ MORE

      For years, the Chinese government has argued that its “nine-dash line” of sovereignty over the entire sea is based on centuries of maritime history and that China’s claim is airtight. The Chinese Foreign Ministry has even asserted that ample historical documents and literature demonstrate that China was “the first country to discover, name, develop and exercise continuous and effective jurisdiction over the South China Sea islands.”

      The truth is somewhat different, however. As veteran journalist Bill Hayton notes in the book, “The South China Sea,” the first Chinese official ever to set foot on one of the Spratly Islands was a nationalist naval officer in 1946, the year after Japan’s defeat in World War II and its own loss of control of the sea. He did so from an American ship crewed by Chinese sailors who were trained in Miami.

      Nine-Dash Line

      As for the story of the nine-dash line, it began a decade earlier through a Chinese government naming commission. China was not even the first to name the islands; the naming commission borrowed and translated wholesale from British charts and pilots. It is unclear how the Chinese government transformed all of this into a bill of goods it has sold to the Chinese people, but by now it is a source of national pride, however misplaced it may be.

      Yet the Chinese government and its people have backed themselves into a corner. In 2016, an international tribunal in The Hague ruled that there is no legal basis for China’s claim over the islands. Meanwhile, Beijing has failed to produce evidence of its declaration to back up its version of the facts. Despite this, the Chinese have been drinking the nine-dash line Kool-Aid for so long that national pride will not allow them to admit that what the government is doing in the South China Sea is illegal under international maritime law — the UN Convention on the Law of the Seas. Ironically, China subscribed to the convention on the very day in 1982 when it first became a legal instrument.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The Chinese government has not personified the rule of law in this case — or in others related to maritime borders — and wants to be able to cherry-pick which provisions of international treaties it will comply with. That is behavior unbecoming of a rising global power and will make states which are signatories to treaties with China wonder if its signature is worth the paper it is printed on. This cannot be in China’s long-term interest.

      The Chinese government views America’s recent naval exercises in the South China Sea as illegal and merely serving to aggravate tensions between the two countries. Washington has maintained for many years that China has no legal basis upon which to continue to assert its maritime claim over the islands, shoals or reefs of the South China Sea. The nations of Asia, and the rest of the world, agree with the US position. The question is: Will the world’s nations join America in publicly and consistently opposing Beijing’s continued illegal actions in the region?

      Who Will Speak Up?

      That seems unlikely. Given Beijing’s recent propensity to practice wolf diplomacy by swiftly and harshly responding to any criticism of its actions, most Asian countries are likely to remain silent. Australia, Japan and South Korea are possible exceptions to that from a military perspective, but given that they have been content to cede that role to America, not much is likely to change in the near future. Australia is already reeling from a healthy dose of wolf diplomacy, which has negatively impacted its bilateral trade with China.

      Beijing has become accustomed to doing whatever it wants, with little consequence. The US, the countries of Asia and much of the rest of the world remained largely silent when Beijing was expropriating and militarizing the Spratly and Paracel Islands. That was a grave error. Now, most governments see little point in objecting to what is, in essence, a fait accompli. Now, short of going to war, China’s militarization of the South China Sea is a reality the world is simply going to have to live with.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

    • 63 Shares169 Views

      in World Politics

      Political Behavior and Basketball Correctness

      by

      Like an elementary school, the United States has a permanent problem defining and enforcing the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. It has reached a point at which every issue becomes focused not on general interest but on individual behavior, largely because the notion of social behavior appears to have been definitively lost.

      Recent weeks have seen an acceleration of the trends associated with what is often called the “culture wars.” Politics itself has been increasingly reduced to accepting or denouncing someone else’s rules to live, work and breathe by. Ironically, in some cases, breathing itself has become the issue.

      Deutsche Bank Regrets Its “Association” With Jeffrey Epstein

      READ MORE

      In a context in which the deprivation of one man’s breath has spawned massive and ongoing protests, the National Basketball Association (NBA), a sports league comprised of a majority of black players, announced that it would allow its players to display on their jerseys a message of solidarity in response to the questions raised by the killing of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis policeman.

      US Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri — a populist Republican in a state that not only has no NBA team but has, in recent years, been rocked by racist violence — audaciously stepped in to deviate the discussion toward themes he considers more legitimate. In the face of recent attacks against the tradition of slavery, Hawley has embraced the sacred cause of defending the memory of the Confederacy and its heroes. He accuses his enemies, the Democrats, of using the pretext of anti-racism to dismantle the police, neuter the military and erase the history of the Confederacy. In his mind, none of those three entities can be suspected of racism, not even the Confederacy, which was just about brave white people defending their traditions.

      Embed from Getty Images

      As a senator, Hawley has no authority over a sports league. But he does have access to public platforms, which he uses to promote his political agenda. He complained that the NBA “is limiting its social messages on jerseys.” Hawley wants the NBA to include in its list of authorized messages his own preferred political mantra, “Free Hong Kong,” which of course has nothing to do with the Floyd drama or with the players’ lives, or, for that matter, the US Senate.

      One of the most respected commentators on the NBA, Adrian Wojnarowski, reacted on Twitter with a simple but deliberately impolite message: “F–k you!” What he meant was: You may be a senator but you have no stake in this; you don’t have the faintest idea of what it is about or what it means to the players, and, moreover, this has nothing to do with China or any other demagogic message you probably want to broadcast to your electoral base.

      That might have been too long for a tweet. The two words he used conveyed the message much more succinctly.

      Alas, for Woj (as the commentator is familiarly known), once Hawley expressed his shock at the crudity of the response, his employer, the sports network ESPN, suspended the seasoned reporter after making this statement on July 13: “This is completely unacceptable behavior and we do not condone it. It is inexcusable for anyone working for ESPN to respond in the way Adrian did to Senator Hawley. We are addressing it directly with Adrian and specifics of those conversations will remain internal.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Unacceptable behavior:

      The expression of justified emotion toward an impertinent figure of authority by someone employed by an organization professionally dedicated to containing expression within a rigidly controlled framework that must avoid offending its audience

      Contextual Note

      Senator Hawley framed his message in populist terms, complaining that by refusing to mention Hong Kong, the NBA was stifling the players’ freedom of expression out of fear of upsetting the Chinese government and losing the lucrative Chinese market. In his letter to the NBA’s commissioner, Adam Silver, Hawley claimed “that the league’s policy on social injustice messages ‘appears to stop at the edge of your corporate sponsors’ sensibilities.’”

      Hawley remembers that the NBA’s delicate attitude toward China had briefly become a hot-button issue in 2019. It resonated with the populist anti-China sentiment pushed by the Trump administration. But that issue has since been eclipsed by something far more dramatic that directly impinges on the lives of players and their families.

      As a senator and supposedly responsible citizen, Hawley should be aware that the NBA’s intention was not to turn players’ jerseys into a new open social media platform for the expression of random political opinions, but rather as an opportunity to express solidarity on an issue that affects their lives.

      Hawley, the politician, sees it as an occasion to score a political point that has nothing to do with the question of racial justice. It would even have the effect of undermining its importance. Race is not a serious issue for Hawley, certainly not as urgent as protecting the political rights of the Hong Kong Chinese. He seems less concerned by the plight of the Saudis, who are far more oppressed.

      As a response to such twisted reasoning, Woj found the best two words to use in the English language.

      Historical Note

      In a speech on June 11 from the floor of the Senate, Josh Hawley invoked Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address and even called one of the most violent battles of the American Civil War a “shared struggle.” He seems to have retained the idea that when two groups of brave people spent four years massacring each other, they were engaged in an act of sharing.

      In a fundamentally hyperreal way, Hawley has a point. Intolerance and even murderously violent behavior in the US have come to exist as a form of sharing to the extent that everyone willingly and often eagerly participates. His message about the Civil War seems to be that white people disagreed only to end up agreeing in the end, which allowed them to emancipate the slaves for the betterment of the nation.

      This view of history implies that once that was done, the problem ceased to exist. That may be why Hawley feels that what the NBA should be focusing not on saving its season interrupted in March by the COVID-19 pandemic, nor on allowing its players to grapple with their racial identity in US society, but addressing the issue he considers vital for his constituents in Missouri: humiliating the Chinese government, if only to comfort President Donald Trump’s and other Republicans’ chances of being reelected.

      In defending the tradition of the South’s role in the war, Hawley claims that his aim is “not to embrace the cause of the Confederacy, but to embrace the cause of union, our union shared together as Americans.” This is particularly ironic coming from a senator from Missouri, since the status of Missouri played a key role in provoking the Civil War. But, as Hawley notes, once the bloodshed and the sacrifice of more than 600,000 American lives was over, the nation came together.

      As author David Rothkopf notes in an article in Haaretz, Trump “has embraced a defense of the losers in the American Civil War as a central theme of his campaign.” Hawley has stepped up to support both of those causes: defending the memory of slave-holders and reelecting Trump. “Let us work together … to build on the history and the responsibility that we share as Americans,” Hawley said. He never stops insisting that it’s all about “sharing.”

      On July 16, Hawley asked for an investigation of a prosecutor focused on the needs of the black community. St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner, an African American, “has sought to reduce incarceration and low-level marijuana cases and has angered the St. Louis police union with her reform efforts.” Most objective observers agree that Gardner’s efforts correspond to the most basic reforms aimed at reducing the patent inequality of a system designed to disproportionately imprison members of the black community. Gardner described Hawley’s demand as “a dog whistle of racist rhetoric and cronyism politics.”

      Some of the new “enlightened” populists on the right, such as the otherwise open-minded and anti-racist Saagar Enjeti, see Hawley as a hero, a defender of a working class that includes oppressed minorities. Adrian Wojnarowski begs to differ. A generation of descendants from former slaves probably feels the same way.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Click here to read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in World Politics

      The Political Implications of the Hagia Sophia Reconversion

      by

      On July 10, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan issued a decree reconverting the Hagia Sophia museum into a mosque, thus realizing a long-cherished dream of conservative currents in Turkish society. Originally built as a cathedral by the Romans, the Hagia Sophia functioned as Istanbul’s main mosque throughout the Ottoman era. Its conversion into a museum in 1934 was one of a series of moves intended to distance Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s new secular republic from the Islamic heritage of the defunct Ottoman Empire — and became a totem of conservative resentment toward the Kemalist regime.

      Why Making Hagia Sophia a Mosque Again Is Good News

      READ MORE

      The reconversion of Hagia Sophia should, therefore, be considered a significant symbolic achievement for the conservative side and a settling of scores with the early republican period. Erdogan is also seeking political gain by treating this issue as an identity battle between conservatives and secularists.

      A Tactical Move?

      According to a poll conducted in June by MetroPOLL, a majority of the Turkish population regard the Hagia Sophia controversy as an attempt by the government to divert attention from economic problems and reverse its declining support. Only 30% said they felt it was really just about a change of use from a museum to a mosque. This means that even among supporters of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its ultranationalist junior partner, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), significant numbers consider the move to be more tactical than ideological — even if they ultimately agree with the outcome.

      Erdogan’s earlier statements also suggest that this is a tactical move. During campaigning for the local election in 2019, he responded angrily to a crowd that raised the topic of Hagia Sophia, pointing out that the adjacent Sultan Ahmad Mosque (Blue Mosque) is almost always empty during prayer times. He told his audience that he would consider reconverting the Hagia Sophia if they first filled the Sultan Ahmed Mosque. Given that this was consistent with previous remarks and little has changed since the exchange, political expediency now seems to have outweighed religious or ideological considerations. Erdogan expects reconversion to produce three political benefits.

      Erdogan’s Political Expectations

      The first benefit is to energize the more conservative segments of his power base by meeting one of their longstanding symbolic demands, in particular in light of the emergence of two splinter parties from the AKP, with the potential to appeal to this electorate. The prominence of the controversy suggests he has succeeded in this.

      The second benefit would be to distract the public from the country’s serious socioeconomic problems. Where the youth unemployment rate — including those who have given up seeking work — has reached 24.6%, the government would like to talk about anything but the economy. Here, Erdogan has gained relief, but probably not to the extent he hoped.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The third and most important benefit would be to establish yet another identity battle between conservatives and secularists. This is the arena where Erdogan feels most secure, and the Hagia Sophia issue appeared ideally suited for the AKP’s identity wars. Its symbolism is multi-layered.

      First of all, a fight over mosque versus museum slots easily into a religion/modernity binary. It can also be used to create an Islam/Christianity binary as Hagia Sophia was originally built as a church and functioned as such for nine centuries until the Ottoman conquest of Istanbul. Secondly, it awakens historical allusions and underlines the real or perceived dichotomy between the Ottoman Empire and the Republic. Reversing a decision taken by Ataturk also inflames existing debates over the early republican reforms. Finally, the move is also expected to provoke adverse international reactions, thus offering a perfect opportunity for Erdogan to breathe new life into his narrative of Turkey encircled by enemies, with Western powers subverting its sovereignty.

      Domestically, Erdogan would expect the reconversion to provoke uproar among secularist circles and lead the secularist People’s Republican Party (CHP) in particular to condemn the decision and mobilize public opposition. This would create another opportunity for him to stir the “culture wars.”

      In fact, however, the CHP and most of the other opposition parties avoided this ploy and either supported the reconversion or remained neutral. This approach is in line with the new strategy of CHP leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu, who has been careful to avoid such traps in recent years. While he has received much criticism from his party base — especially the secularist intelligentsia — for his calculated lack of interest in cultural conflicts, Kilicdaroglu seems to have been successful in preventing Erdogan from picking his fights.

      In light of the lack of domestic push-back, the Turkish president will focus on international condemnation to fan the flames of identity conflicts, presenting these reactions as interference in Turkey’s internal affairs — if not outright Islamophobia. Given that certain European countries have their own problems with accommodating Muslim places of worship, European criticisms can easily be framed as hypocritical and anti-Islamic.

      In that sense, Hagia Sophia is the perfect fight for Erdogan: it is symbolic, emotionally charged, politically polarizing and consolidates political camps. And all this is achieved with scant real-life consequences. European policymakers should follow the example set by the opposition parties in Turkey and deny Erdogan the trivial rhetorical fights he clearly seeks.

      *[The German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) advises the German government and Bundestag on all questions related to foreign and security policy. An earlier version of this article was first published on the SWP website.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

    • 125 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      Pressure from Trump led to 5G ban, Britain tells Huawei

      by

      The British government privately told the Chinese technology giant Huawei that it was being banned from Britain’s 5G telecoms network partly for “geopolitical” reasons following huge pressure from President Donald Trump, the Observer has learned.In the days leading up to the controversial announcement on Tuesday last week, intensive discussions were held and confidential communications exchanged between the government and Whitehall officials on one side and Huawei executives on the other.As part of the high-level behind-the-scenes contacts, Huawei was told that geopolitics had played a part, and was given the impression that it was possible the decision could be revisited in future, perhaps if Trump failed to win a second term and the anti-China stance in Washington eased.Senior Huawei executives have gone public since Tuesday’s decision saying that they hope the British government will rethink, apparently encouraged by the results of back-channel contacts.The government’s private admissions are out of kilter with public statements last week by ministers, who said Huawei had been banned because of new security concerns raised by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), which is part of GCHQ.In the Commons, Oliver Dowden, the secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport, said new sanctions forbidding the sale of US-produced components to Huawei – meaning the Chinese company will have to source them from elsewhere – had changed the balance of security risk.“The new US measures restrict Huawei’s ability to produce important products using US technology or software,” he said. “The National Cyber Security Centre has reviewed the consequences of the US’s actions …“The NCSC has now reported to ministers that they have significantly changed their security assessment of Huawei’s presence in the UK 5G network. Given the uncertainty this creates around Huawei’s supply chain, the UK can no longer be confident it will be able to guarantee the security of future Huawei 5G equipment affected by the change in the US foreign direct product rules.” More